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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN">
<html> <head>
<title>A New Web-Browser/Editor</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffefd5" text="#181871">
<H4>
"Linux Gazette...<I>making Linux just a little more fun!</I>"
</H4>
<P> <HR> <P>
<!--===================================================================-->
<center><h1>Amaya</h1></center>
<center><h3>Introduction</h3></center>
<center><h4><a href="mailto: layers@vax2.rainis.net">by Larry
Ayers</a></h4></center>
<P> <HR>
<!--===================================================================-->
<p>For several years a group of programmers in France have been developing
an elaborate text-processing system known as Thot. Thot has some
resemblances to Tex, in that it is a structural document-editing system
capable of very high-quality output. One major difference is that Thot is
more WYSIWYG; the formatting tagging is hidden and doesn't have to be
explicitly written by the user. The output formats are more varied as well.
Thot can produce Postscript files, as Tex can, but it can also produce plain
ASCII text and HTML.
This last formatting capability attracted the attention of the W3
Consortium a couple of years ago. (W3 is an international research
organization which attempts to set standards for Internet documents; their
flexibility and patience have been sorely tried in recent years by the flood
of HTML innovations introduced by Microsoft and Netscape, among others).
Using the Thot system as a core, the W3 group in collaboration with the Thot
developers have been developing a combined web-browser and HTML editor known
as Amaya.
<center><h3>Source and Installation</h3></center>
<p>Amaya, as is the case with much Linux software, is a work-in-progress.
Until recently the source code was restricted to members of the W3
Consortium and only binary versions were available to the public. In early
February the source was made freely available, both at the
<a href="http://www.w3.org/amaya ">Amaya web-site</a> and also at the
Sunsite archive site, currently in the <i>/pub/Linux/Incoming</i> directory.
<p>Amaya can be installed anywhere as long as the directory structure is
preserved. It is a Motif application, so unless you have the Motif
libraries and header files installed you will have to get the
statically-linked binary distribution. Compiling the source necessitates
obtaining and compiling the Thot toolkit as well, which is available from
the same locations as Amaya. I compiled it from source and found the
instructions to be somewhat unclear; after several false starts I found that
the Thot source should be unarchived first, then the Amaya source should be
unarchived so that the Amaya directory is a subdirectory of the top-level
Thot directory. This is a very large source tree and needs about sixty
megabytes of free disk-space over and above that required for the source
itself. It compiled without errors but there was no evident means provided
for cleaning up the object files, etc. I resorted to moving subdirectories
which looked un-essential to another drive, then moving back the essential
ones which it turned out Amaya needs. You might want to try the binary
version first in order to determine if it suits you before going to the
trouble of obtaining and compiling the source.
<p>One caution: the first time you start Amaya, point it at a local file;
otherwise it will attempt to load a file from http://www.w3.org and if
you're not on-line at the time, it will die with a segmentation fault. The
default home-page can be set to one on your local disk in the
initialization file if you'd like.
<center><h3>Editing and Browsing With Amaya</h3></center>
<p>As an HTML editor Amaya is WYSIWYG all the way. There is no view of the
file being edited which shows the actual HTML tags. The main window
<a href="./gx/ayers/amaya_main.gif">(take a look!)</a> is a typical browser
window complete with in-line graphics, with the major difference being that
you can enter text. The various HTML tags are invisibly inserted by means
of mouse-driven menus. I much prefer hot-keys and found that, though few
are included by default, any number of them can be set up in the
<i>~/.thotrc</i> file. The behaviour of the <kbd>enter</kbd> key is
interesting. Pressing the key while just typing text will start a new
paragraph, whereas if you are entering list-items, table-fields or other
sequential tags another one is created.
<p>There are two alternative file views available: the first is the
"Structure View" <a href="./gx/ayers/amaya_struc.gif"> (here's a
screenshot)</a> which presents a tree-like diagram of the HTML file. I
suppose this could be useful with large files, just to get an overview.
Another window, the "Alternate View"
<a href="./gx/ayers/amaya_alt.gif">(another screenshot)</a>, shows you what
your file will look like when displayed by a text-mode browser such as Lynx.
I thought this was a nice touch. It's all too easy to work up an HTML file,
test it with Netscape or Mosaic, and never even consider that it may be
illegible viewed with a text-mode browser.
<p>As a web-browser Amaya has some limitations. It is confused by many of
the newer Netscape tags, though on relatively simple pages it does a good
job. As an example, the Linux Gazette table-of-contents page is displayed
in a garbled fashion. The spiral-notebook graphic on the left side of the
page isn't rendered, and the table formatting isn't interpreted
correctly. In contrast, the bulk of LG's content pages display well, but
they are usually simpler in format.
<p>Amaya wasn't really created to be a full-fledged browser, though it may
approach that status in future releases. The W3 "position statement" on
Amaya says that it is intended to be a test-bed platform for HTML
development.
<p>I never have become comfortable using Amaya, or any WYSIWYG HTML editor
for that matter, to create HTML files from scratch. What I have been using
it for is to experiment with already-written files. Sometimes when the
precise tagging I want eludes me, I've loaded the file into Amaya just to
see how it approaches the problem. It might be wise to begin using Amaya on
copies of files. I favor lower-case tagging but when Amaya saves a file it
will replace all of the tagging with its own, and this is all uppercase.
Some of its other choices may not be what you want as well, so working with
a copy allows you to incorporate the changes you like into the original
file, leaving the rest alone.
<center><h3>Conclusion</h3></center>
<p>Amaya is an interesting project, and even at this early stage it's stable
enough to be usable. I wouldn't want to have to rely on it solely, but it
has proved useful to me on several occasions. Now that the source has been
made public perhaps other programmers will make contributions; it's likely
that in future months new releases will be made, amd its capabilities will
increase.
<hr>
<address><a href="http://vax2.rainis.net/~layers/">Larry Ayers<layers@vax2.rainis.net></a></address>
<!-- hhmts start -->
Last modified: Thu Feb 27 18:50:42 CST 1997
<!-- hhmts end -->
<!--===================================================================-->
<P> <hr> <P>
<center><H5>Copyright © 1997, Larry Ayers <BR>
Published in Issue 15 of the Linux Gazette, March 1997</H5></center>
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